Vicarious, secondhand embarrassment.
Vicarious, secondhand embarrassment — the shame felt on behalf of another who is behaving embarrassingly, often without realizing it.
Unlike ordinary embarrassment, the feeling is for someone else's awkwardness, not one's own — and it is frequently described as the opposite of Schadenfreude: discomfort, not pleasure, at another's social failure, rooted in empathy (more empathetic people report stronger Fremdscham). It is the engine of “cringe comedy.” Spanish has the parallel vergüenza ajena.
fremd “other, external” + Scham “shame” = “other-shame.”
A transparent modern German compound: fremd “foreign, external” + Scham/schämen “shame / to be ashamed.”
A relatively recent word: it entered the Duden in 2009, and “Fremdschämen” was Austria's Word of the Year in 2010. The underlying concept (“vicarious / empathic embarrassment”) has appeared in English-language psychology since the 1980s.